Today's business travelers have almost continuous access to either a cellular or a conventional telephone in any given stage of travel. The telephone is often the most convenient and efficient method of communication between the business travelers and their clients. Frequently, traveling business people also need to collaborate with the home organization and with clients, vendors, and business partners. The conference call has developed into a useful tool in forming these collaborative sessions.
As convenient as a conference call is, conference calls still contain a number of disadvantages over conventional conferences. One of these disadvantages is identifying who is participating in a conference call. Another disadvantage is controlling the attending parties of a conference call. Perhaps the largest disadvantage of a conference call is that the parties cannot break into smaller groups to have private meetings to discuss proposals made during the conference call. In mediation and arbitration settings these private sessions are frequently necessary. Therefore, given the existing state of the art, conference calls are not practical for many arbitration and mediation sessions.
Many inventions have been directed towards improving conference calls. However, most center on a method or apparatus for identifying the parties involved in a conference call. Relatively few, if any, address the problem of controlling the flow of information between attending parties. Therefore, a need exist for an invention which is able to control the flow of information between parties during a conference call. A need also exists for a graphical method of identifying and controlling the attributes of the individual conference call participants.